Things I Never Thought I’d Miss: A Commuter’s Tale
The disbelief found in the nostalgia of ‘normal life’ and its chores
“The other day I caught myself thinking something that one year ago would have seemed unthinkable. A thought so utterly detestable that it stopped me dead in my tracks, mid morning coffee (an impressive feat). At first I tried to ignore it, convinced it would go away, but this only made the feeling grow stronger, until at last I was forced to say it out loud to my now highly-concerned boyfriend.
“I…I think I miss my commute.”
The words hung in the air like stale perfume. My boyfriend stared at me in disbelief. I gulped down the dregs of my coffee in humiliation. It had taken ten months and a global pandemic to finally make me nostalgic for something I assumed I’d hate forever. How could I let this happen? Was I remembering it wrong? There were so many questions filling my mind as I tried to decipher the cause of this inexplicable change of heart.
For starters, there were so many things to deter me from this wistful statement. Door-to-door, my commute took me two hours. The stops between Hove and London Bridge will forever be etched into my memory, my 6am alarm is something I refuse to believe ever happened, and that time that I got on the wrong train and ended up in Peckham, meaning that I arrived home at the lovely hour of 10pm, has been filed under: ‘Commutes I’d Rather Forget’. There are so many of these unfortunate journeys that I had actually started to title them as though they were Friends’ episodes – for example there was: ‘The One Where My Bag Got Stuck in the Electronic Doors’, ‘The One Where the Train Caught Fire’ (really, though), and my personal favourite, ‘The One Where I Fell Asleep and Ended Up in Orpington’.
“ I wondered where they were now. All those recurring characters that I inadvertently shared my morning coffee with, vanishing from my daily life like a cancelled train from an electronic notice board.”
So why on earth was I feeling so nostalgic for my commute? I certainly wasn’t missing having to navigate the daily man spreads, and lord knows I sleep better without having a stranger’s loud phone conversation living rent-free in my head. I guess when I really thought long and hard about it, I realised it was the smaller things that I was missing, those fleeting moments that would normally be of no significance whatsoever, but that when faced with days and weeks and months without them, becoming surprisingly significant. The sunset, for example. The sunset is different when you’re on a train, it just is. Whenever I felt a little bitter that I wouldn’t be arriving home before 8pm, the mix of candy floss and pastel blue on the horizon whilst Bon Iver played in my headphones and the whole carriage filled with this golden glow, well…it made up for the rest of it. Reading a book is different, too. You can open a book whilst surrounded by skyscrapers and bridges and busy-looking suits, only to look up mid-chapter, surrounded by glorious countryside and horses galloping through fields. I stand by the fact that the commuter train is the best place to get lost in your favourite pages. And then there’s the people – somehow, against all odds, I found myself missing them too. I missed the crying woman being handed a tissue by a stranger and the man who always offered his seat to the elderly passenger, I even missed the person announcing their latest work triumph over the phone, (even if it was unnecessarily loud). I missed the man who would walk unashamedly through the train, playing Bruce Springsteen on his acoustic guitar and asking commuters for spare change. I wondered where they were now. All those recurring characters that I inadvertently shared my morning coffee with, vanishing from my daily life like a cancelled train from an electronic notice board.
I felt like Tom from 500 Days of Summer, when he starts listing all the things he loves about Summer (I love her smile. I love her hair. I love her knees), and in a few argument-filled scenes later he’s reciting these same characteristics as things that he hates about her (I hate Summer. I hate her crooked teeth. I hate her knobbly knees). Except I was experiencing the reverse. After a year of going cold-turkey, I was now declaring my undying love for the daily commute. I’d take back its squeaky folding tables in an instant, the baby crying at 7am seemed like a distant memory, and I felt like we could finally draw a line under the many, many times I’d been left stranded after an “unexpected” breakdown. Perhaps it was true that absence only made the heart grow stronger, but I was now happy to admit that I’d never take my two-hour, people-filled, running-behind, sunset-laden, always-changing daily train for granted ever again.”
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To see more from Emma you can find her on Instagram at @emmalouise_stevens!